


really going to spiral here

by SolaSola



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 01 Season 02: Fantasy High Sophomore Year (Dimension 20), Campaign 03 Season 01: The Unsleeping City, Campaign 05: A Crown of Candy, Campaign 06: Pirates of Leviathan, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:08:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 5,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27310222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolaSola/pseuds/SolaSola
Summary: A collection of bullet point headcanons and ficlets (200 to 1k words) from Tumblr, mostly friendship and/or angst across multiple Dimension 20 seasons.1. (fhsy) Gorgug & Ayda friendship2. (fhsy) Half-orc diaspora!Gorgug - in which I project all my Viet feels onto Gorgug3. (fhsy) Barkstock & Barkrock - Danielle & Ragh unexpected friendship4. (tuc1) A new and more forgiving heroism - Post-TUC1 Dream Team5. (fhsy) Caffeine cuties - Kristen & Riz go get late night cortados after spring break6. (acoc) Twinless-speak - Ruby & Jet & Liam Episode 9 angst7. (pirol) Post-canon Marcid & Spaulding mentorship8. (pirol) Post-canon epistolary look into Cheese's Trapper Keeper - Cheese & Spaulding and the Buccaneer Buddies9. (fhsy) Half-orc diaspora manifesto - more bullet pointed thoughts about Gorgug and the Barkrocks
Comments: 5
Kudos: 36





	1. Gorgug & Ayda friendship

**thinking bout gorgug and ayda’s friendship like**

  * “i forbid you to ever read a single word of wizardry” 
  * it becomes a keystone of their friendship. gorgug doesn’t read a lot but if/when ayda ever sees him reading something (a novel, random pamphlets, the back of a cereal box) she goes “wizardry?” and he always goes “no never don’t worry”
  * gorgug intuitively understands exactly why ayda created the friendship section
  * ayda doesn’t generally like being touched but gorgug gives very FIRM vicelike hugs and they’re very good hugs
  * gorgug sharing playlists of music that isn’t sea shanties
  * introducing ayda to noise-cancelling headphones for when she’s reading in the library and ayda absolutely SCREECHES with joy
  * both of them taking care of fig
  * making sure fig doesn’t fall asleep in uncomfortable places when they’re on tour
  * the two people in the party who can lift the gravity axe. gorgug maybe asks if ayda wants to work out together a couple of times. 
  * sharing oranges (also, they’re healthy and gorgug’s a growing half-orc boy)
  * as an artificer gorgug goes through ayda’s door to the library to check out the gilded telescope of the compass points observatory. he determines conclusively that a telescope in fact is just a spyglass pointed at the stars. 




	2. Half-orc diaspora!Gorgug

maybe in the summer after freshman year gorgug starts really hanging out with ragh more. and ragh makes some offhand comment about elmville’s orctoberfest orcish heritage festival that he and his mom go to every fall, because while elmville and solace in general are predominantly human there’s still a pretty big orc/half-orc community, and gorgug goes  _ huh, i didn’t know that was a thing _ and ragh gleefully invites him but also says “it’s honestly kind of boring dude, but you can like totally come with”

or ragh kind of gives a little “sup” to katja cleaver across the quad when he’s walking with gorgug to porter’s class and then goes, “yeah i guess most of the half-orc kids kind of know each other? i’m fuckin scared of her, dude, she’s beaten me at arm wrestling the last five times i tried” and gorgug frowns

and on the one hand it’s amazing to just go over to mordred manor where lydia waves hi (usually with a knife in hand) and where gorgug knows dinner is going to be like.  _ authentic _ home-made chili and it feels like home and it also feels like more than that?

but on the other hand, while gorgug is used to rage, this is a new and different kind of frustration that simmers a little bit lower. because it was  _ all right there, it was always right there for you _ and he wonders if he should have been doing more, if he’s lost parts of being a half-orc that he can’t really get back

* * *

hm no actually wait i have more. gorgug is canonically fluent in gnomish but idk if he speaks orc? and the two languages both use the same alphabet but obviously are not interchangable

so gorgug’s over at katja’s house because zelda’s made him her plus one to some seven maidens picnic and katja’s parents have all of this kitschy stuff around their house (it feels… pretty much exactly like the thistlespring tree’s taste in decor, actually)

and gorgug’s being a little bit of a wallflower/just watching his gf be with her friends and have fun and there’s like. some cutesy plaque or some runic calligraphy in a heart shaped frame on the hallway wall and it looks like orcish.

and gorgug can read gnomish, and the alphabet’s the same but the words aren’t. (and this is a familiar feeling to him, but with things that matter more/less than this) it feels so much like something he’s supposed to know but just wrong enough that he can’t. and it’s  _ dumb _ because it’s probably just some proverb about keeping your tusks clean and your head up, or literally just live laugh love, but it’s still frustrating

and maybe he’ll ask lydia about it next time he’s at mordred or maybe he’ll take orcish as his foreign language (and get weird looks for it, because how is he not a heritage speaker?) when he goes to bastion university in a couple of years, but right now it’s dumb and it makes him feel dumb, and he tries not to think about it


	3. Barkstock & Barkrock

i know that we have almost zero seven maidens lore esp wrt ages BUT i would argue that danielle barkstock should 100% be a senior graduating at the end of the bad kids’ sophomore year 

putting on my murph consequences hat for a moment, because this is explicitly to punish brennan lee mulligan for last naming two aguefort NPCs barkrock and barkstock within the same campaign

danielle barkstock gets her name read at graduation RIGHT AFTER ragh goes absolutely feral, smashes the podium to bits, and screams “BAD KIDS FOR LIFE MOTHERFUCKERS LET’S GET FEISTY” and either a) 100% rolls with it because that’s just aguefort, baby or b) sighs, casts wood shape on the broken splinters, and saves gilear from a truly miserable situation

* * *

like their personalities match in approximately zero ways but also that’s just high school, you become friends for dumb reasons because you’re all just in the same place together for absurdly long amounts of time for reasons you can’t control (this was my high school experience lol, ymmv)

ragh didn’t bring any pencils to the fantasy SAT, danielle druid-magics some up for him. yes i know shape wood isn’t a real 5e spell but a) it really should be, please buff the druids some more and b) ragh needs pencils, like, BAD

at some point in their freshman year danielle’s fox escapes and goes haring off towards the highly monster-laden woods, ragh does this truly majestic flying tackle to recapture it. 

some teacher who  _ really _ needs reading glasses thinks their last names are the same when reading off attendance on the first day of class and asks ragh if they’re twins, at which point both of them are like ???? sir with all due respect what the fuck

absolutely no basis for this other than that danielle is tall and broad shouldered physically but i feel like a) the maidens have a lot of people who are good at like. hitting things until they die but they need someone to keep this group on task and also in vaguely good spirits? and also b) idk i just get like. club soccer player vibes? so they’re both in the athletic director’s council or whatever the equivalent is. danielle brings rlly good homemade muffins, ragh brings oranges lovingly cut up by his mom and sealed into those big tupperware with the rubbery lids yknow?

the “more senior members of this friend group/club bond together and adopt the freshmen, often creating intricate webs of quasi-familial relationships” dynamic was extremely important to me in hs and i simply think that both ostentatia and danielle would adopt zelda w/i the seven maidens? zelda calls them both “mom” and it starts as a joke and then it becomes not a joke (i think this is partly how walstock happens). when zelda starts going out w gorgug and then when zelda starts joining gorgug + ragh’s barbarian workouts danielle is assigned to vet him and goes “yeah ragh’s chill.” possibly goes out back and gives ragh a platonic version of the shovel talk that involves “don’t you dare hurt my daughter i’m aware that’s what sparring is, hurting each other on purposes, but i will summon pixies and kill you” and ragh’s like “since when do you have a daughter?!”

this should go without saying because obviously this is canon by now /j but after danielle and ostentatia figure their shit out and start dating over spring break they go to lgbt union meetings together 

i feel like their friendship would be a lot of casual fist bumps + a lot of danielle rolling her eyes/sighing (as she wood shapes pencils/podiums/other random crap back together) + a lot of danielle baking and having no one at her house who eats that much vs. ragh needing to carboload at all times 


	4. A new and more forgiving heroism

some rambly thoughts on the dream team after tuc, before this inevitably gets jossed by a sequel, i am speaking it into existence

  * not that kingston doesn’t love who the dream team have become, after they fight the american dream, but like
  * his old team, the people he fought the mummy of the met with? they really are gone. alejandro is gone, kug still exists _somewhere_ but not in the very real and tactile and everyday way that kingston walks through the world, jackson got his life force necromantically ripped out of him, rowan isn’t misty and is her whole new own person, which kingston is a good enough person to respect
  * one of the reasons i am very eyes emoji at the post-tuc polycule is that it’s literally everyone remaining except kingston so it is very obvious that kingston is The Old One Left
  * but also kingston brown, man! he loves love and he loves the dream team so he’s not bitter about it in any real way
  * (he’s not bitter but he sure can be frustrated when pete sends a bunch of unintelligible slang on twelve different messaging/social media platforms and kingston’s still trying to figure out gifs)
  * like. kingston is not on the surface lonely person he’s the _vox populi_ but also i think it’s very interesting for kingston to be not-lonely amid an entirely new-to-him cast of heroes, in a way that’s a little bit angsty but also very on brand for tuc
  * like the kingston and liz will-they-won’t-they, slowly falling back into each other’s lives in a more guarded but also a more genuine way? 
  * kingston gets to love love for his own sake, too, for once



* * *

okay wait. also i know i keep writing about legacy and heroism and apprenticeship but hear me out

  * the way in which the new (?) dream team are taking up the roles of the people kingston used to fight alongside. esther fits so easily into alejandro’s role, the new mistress of the gramercy occult society. sofia is leading jackson’s order. ricky’s left the only job he’s ever had in order to start something to honor kug and what kug did (and what kug wished he could have been doing better). rowan, well, is a new incarnation of misty but is also coming into her own, grounded in a way that even at her most successful misty was not? for all her power misty was running from titania her whole life, wasn’t sure if she was harvesting glamour harmlessly, and rowan gets to be sure about all those things.
  * they are so very thoroughly not the same as those who came before them but that’s like. the point! they are growing into their own and leaving their own mark on new york left behind to them
  * okay but guess who’s not on that list? _pete_
  * pete and kingston man that friendship just. i’m love it. so much.
  * pete obviously is the phantasma to kingston’s populi but in NO ways is pete the new kingston. honestly i’m v much a fan of the pete-can-still-mind-link-with-the-everything-that-is-kug hc? pete is a lot more like kug than he is like kingston but more than any of that he is so obviously his own person, his own vox
  * pete is the living embodiment of a new and maybe more forgiving heroism and i simply think that kingston getting to watch him (yes, maybe lose obscene amounts of money to his dad at dominoes, and maybe complain about having to figure out his customer service voice working at that bookstore, but also) bumble and grow into that is something kingston would value a lot



tl;dr let the new dream team teach kingston random dumb shit, let kingston yes grumble about how old he is and everything he’s seen come and go but also just like. be a 55 year old man which is  _ not that old _ and kingston is as much a part of the new team as any of the rest of them, he gets to reinvent himself a little bit too 


	5. Caffeine cuties

**okay but like i want kristen and riz to go get late night cortados together after spring break**

  * riz is up working and is about to brew himself the third pot of coffee for the night when kristen’s like “do you wanna just take a field trip and get some _actually good_ coffee though”
  * “i’m not gonna tell you to stop drinking coffee and go to sleep, riz, who do you think i am, jawbone? i’m just offering you some espresso. live a little.” 
  * and there isn’t really a big case he’s working on, not after the nightmare king, so riz grumbles a little but he says yes
  * it’s like 1am and kristen takes him to a janky musty 24-hour basement cafe near the elmville train station that tracker showed her. riz loves it instantly
  * it’s natural that riz loves the night, he’s a goblin and a rogue, but kristen’s coming into her own as a twilight domain cleric wielding the staff of doubt
  * just two very dangerous people who will literally see everything on the street before it sees them, walking down the street on an unstoppable quest for caffeine
  * riz drinks his tiny cup of cortado and is like “weird, it’s not acidic at all, is this even coffee” and kristen dumps half a can of condensed milk and cream into hers
  * they end up talking, because there’s something about good coffee and a friend in a basement cafe at 1am that makes you want to say things you wouldn’t say in daylight
  * (this got long; more feelings and shenanigans under the cut) 


  * kristen thinks, this is what cassandra means, the dark is full of secrets but they’re _good_ secrets
  * do you ever think about how the two of them are now aligned with a celestial plane and what that would mean to riz, whose entire worldview is about _work_ and _love_ and things that are _real_ and not believed (riz does not believe. riz thinks, and then he finds the things worth thinking about)
  * “how do you know?” riz asks  
“sometimes you don’t” kristen says
  * i think after this night and some secrets riz might take kristen to his dad’s grave sometime. now when he goes to the gravestone he knows his dad is listening, and there’s a difference in doing stuff bc it’s a comforting ritual and doing stuff bc it MEANS something. and kristen has a very practiced but also by now very innate sense of what is sacred and i think riz would appreciate that—she would know what to do at pok’s headstone (and also know when you need to break the sacred with the humorous)
  * and do you ever think about how kristen for all her sainthood is missing tracker and is missing her philosophy students, a little bit
  * thinking about a kristen who doesn’t call spirit guardians for a long time after the nightmare forest just because it’s so alien to think about what they might be
  * cleric homework is harder when your powers come from breaking an eight hundred fifty year old curse on a goddex who didn’t have a name for nearly a millennia but also kristen gets frustrated that _this_ is what’s hard, this is what she’s dashing herself against now?
  * and riz, well, is very familiar with the fact that work is love is work, and that also sometimes work is just hard late nights
  * and is also chill with kristen spending a whole chunk of the summer just in a blanket burrito in his office heckling him weakly while he finishes up the reports for the nightmare king case (because both of them are the kind of people who just want another person in their space sometimes)
  * both of them seem like people who love the process (and the uncertainty, and the truth no matter how hard you have to work or how many gods you have to reject to find it) and therefore they thrive in the caffeinated late nights
  * (and don’t think about how for all the team rizten jokes both of them are people who care deeply about their friends under the jokes and i think “being 0 for 3″ would hurt)
  * riz thinks he failed kristen—she sacrificed herself to save him and he couldn’t get them out of the forest in time and she saved him _again_ in the dusk moss ritual when he remembered what his friends have done for him and then he failed _again_ , couldn’t get tracker with that tincture dart
  * riz is not usually anyone’s first choice to talk about feelings so when kristen starts being absurdly tactile and grabbing him into her blanket burrito it feels just a little like saint applebees’ forgiveness
  * they probably walk home (unafraid) from the cafe and end up sitting on the roof of riz’s office, because who’s gonna tell them to go to sleep
  * “wanna sneak up to the roof?” / “did you even have to ask?”
  * kristen probably almost impales herself on the corner of an AC unit or something - “aren’t humans supposed to have good dex?” / “guess i missed the memo while i was dying twice and creating two and a half gods” / “noted. i can’t pull you up though, so good luck”
  * they’re so overcaffeinated on 1am espressos they just stay up all night but it’s their native habitat and no one’s gonna stop them
  * tl;dr they’re FRIENDS they’re GOOD FRIENDS team rizten is now 1 for 4




	6. Twinless-speak

in 5e if you retrain/change your class or subclass do you lose language/code fluencies? druidic and thieves’ cant are technically class features, but they’re languages! 

it makes a smidge more sense for, say, a rogue to not be able to do sneak attack anymore if they retrain their level and now their fighting style is less subtle. but if the level you retrain is one with magic, or one with language fluency?

do you just forget whole languages? like, the consequence for a non-druid to use or speak druidic is the loss of druid powers, but someone who retrained would already have given them up—so what do you have to lose?

* * *

big acoc spoilers + conjectured meta that may be slightly au

  * i say this specifically bc i’ve been thinking about how jet didn’t die a rogue, she died a full seventh-level fighter
  * like okay, when liam gained his first rogue levels and learned (reskinned) thieves’ cant, it was flavored as the twins teaching him twinspeak which is a really sweet character moment especially as the party got closer-knit
  * and jet retrained her one rogue level around the same time and that was also a cool character moment, growing up and figuring out who she wanted to be and becoming more of a leader
  * (quick thing, both liam and jet speak twinspeak in ep 9, and jet mentions she’s retraining her rogue level in this episode. i’m not 100% sure on when jet retrained /when liam picked up his assassin levels. if my above conjecture that a rogue would lose thieves’ cant/twinspeak is true, it could still be possible that jet’s retrained level was supposed to kick in during the next combat in ep 10 (since they level up between combats) and she didn’t have it yet. or said conjecture could also just be very wrong, and jet wouldn’t have lost twinspeak. but let me play in this space for a sec, for angst reasons)
  * the dulcington ambush is a rogue’s rogue’s habitat—foreign infiltration team, reconnaissance mission, darkness, ambush, sneak attacks, deception, lethality
  * what would it mean for the lone fighter to die in the encounter made for a rogue (an encounter crafted by rogues, but also survived by rogues)
  * what would it mean for ruby to run from her sister who’s just given up one of the things that ties the two of them together, the language they made just for the two of them
  * what would it mean for liam to have this phantom connection to a past version of jet, who let him into the twins’ circle of confidence and shared communication, a version of jet that she let die even before he let _her_ die in his arms
  * it’s just! such a small but also such a painful reminder of like. the choices jet made, to be braver and louder and less sneaky as she was coming into her own. and that maybe that bravery and that loudness and that desire to lead not only didn’t save her, but doomed her
  * does ruby wonder if her sister had stayed a little bit more childish, a little bit more mischievous, a little less eager to grow up so soon, a little bit more like ruby herself, that maybe jet would have gotten to grow up at all? 




	7. Marcid & Spaulding mentorship

  * YOUR BROTHER SPAULDING WAS A MATE OF MINE OKAY
  * THEY KNEW EACH OTHER BEFORE
  * (like okay yes marcid used that information to hurt cheese the first time he revealed it but THE POSSIBILITES)
  * bonding over absolutely hating water (those druids had the gnome kids partially submerged in pools in suspended animation, just their mouths above water, it’d feel like you were drowning _all the time,_ a conduit for something bigger and more sinister than you) and how that kind of fear never really goes away but you learn to live with it and gets better and you really can live after it all
  * night times on the prow of the ship talking about cheese, and spaulding worrying about how much of cheese’s life and growing up he’s missed, and marcid vouching for how much cheese has grown just like he did for sunny and her family (after all, cheese also beat marcid in single combat!) 
  * and you _know_ marcid “kindest antihero you ever did see” the typhoon wouldn’t hesitate to kind-of-sort-of adopt spaulding like he did cheese, obviously not treading on spaulding’s toes but yknow providing an older mentor figure spaulding can ask for when he needs help
  * spaulding was his family’s sole income for a long time even before he went on the pilgrimage and he really is interested in picking up skills, and marcid would love to spend some time explaining everything he picked up working for the crescent moon company because this world is all about weaponized bureaucracy and paperwork as a bludgeoning weapon
  * marcid would give fucking amazing hugs and i don’t need to qualify or explain this at all




	8. Cheese's Trapper Keeper

**Concept: post-canon epistolary/multimedia look into Cheese’s Trapper Keeper**

  * He’s got spells in there, sure, but there are also a bunch of letters and other notes. It’s one of the only things he took with him when he left Cannon Court (he wasn’t necessarily planning for that to be the last time he was in that house, but he’s also not going back).
  * A part of him knows he owns a ship now, or at least has his name on a bunch of Ramble paperwork, and he does keep some stuff in his quarters in the crow’s nest on the Harvest Moon. But the important stuff is still kept in something he can pick up and run with, just in case—old habits die hard.
  * Cheese hasn’t been able to actually talk to Spaulding since the pool in the Sternwood, so he writes letters to him every day on their mission—he wants to give them all to him, like a big bundle of journal entries, if they find him. When they find him.
  * He feels like he’s a totally different person from the one that Spaulding knew when he left, and sure these brothers always crit on insight checks on each other but it’s all the little things, all the little parts of life Spaulding missed.
  * He starts really trying to write one note to Spaulding every day the first day that the Harvest Moon sets off for the shores of Sylvare—“we’re gonna bring you back, buddy, you’re gonna be okay when we find you, and I have a ship now and you’re gonna get to sail like you always wanted to, and I’m gonna get to learn magic with you, and we’re gonna go on adventures together just you and me! And my crew! I have a crew now! Love, Cheese”
  * Cheese was a paper hoarder when he lived in Cannon Court and so there end up being a lot of scraps of the rest of the crew’s stuff that they abandon stuffed in that binder too
  * (Bob scribbling down songs in gorgeous cursive, Myrtle scrawling out mixed drink recipes and leaving wet splotches all over the paper from dripping on it, crumpled up paper from Marcid’s accounting, a copy of a map that Jack’s shared with Cheese for captainly decisionmaking. At one point Sunny signs a page in Cheese’s binder like it’s a middle school yearbook, a big “HAGS” in loopy letters for “Have a great sea voyage!”)
  * More feelings and friendship under the cut!


  * There’s a night when there’s just an absolute ton of other people’s crap stuck into Cheese’s spellbook and there’s no entry to Spaulding from that night. The next day’s says “I’m so sorry I forgot, we just had a whole day, and we sacked an outpost and had a bonfire on the beach!! I wish you were here but it was so fun, Jack and Bob had a sea shanty sing-off and Sunny looted some of the bodies of guys we, uh, killed, and we’ve got some maps and we’re on our way!!! Love, Cheese”
  * There are also nights when there are no entries to Spaulding because they’re bad days. They get attacked by merfolk which makes Myrtle pissed, and a couple of their hurled tridents have splintered open holes in the hull that are filling the lower decks with bilgewater, so now Cheese has to spend the whole night methodically casting Mending over and over again.
  * (His Trapper Keeper got soaked with seawater and Cheese has to rewrite a bunch of spells into it. A few of them were the really old ones he knew, with notes in Spaulding’s handwriting from back when they were learning magic together before his brother ever left on pilgrimage. Marcid finds Cheese curled into a ball and sniffling sitting against the mast, hand shaking too much to rewrite the spell, and just picks him up into a big hug when he does. Cheese tells himself that they’re going to find Spaulding soon, and there will be more spells they can write together.)
  * Cheese doesn’t know Sending yet so he writes letters to Ayda, sending them back on other Leviathan-bound ships when they meet in port or just using them as reminders to himself about what to ask her about when she occasionally and randomly teleports and appears on the Harvest Moon’s deck for a chat.
  * Their letters are all long strings of bullet points trailing off into spirals of subpoints nested under subpoints under subpoints, explaining their tangents in minute detail because it’s so cool and interesting even when they maybe forget what the original conversation was about. Bullet points are how Ayda’s brain works and Cheese also finds a whole bunch of gel pens he shares with Sunny to color-code them to make them work for his brain too.
  * Cheese peruses his brand new spellbook but he’s still copying spells into his Trapper Keeper because that’s his and it’s safe. Ayda’s also very intrigued by what she calls Cheese’s “use of alternative vernacular verbal components” and teleports to the Harvest Moon for long interested chats about it. They start writing papers about it, casting Magic Missile/Baby You’re A Firework/Missile of Magic?/Sparkle Darts off the side of the ship into the night to test out different names for it to see if they work the same. Cheese carefully tucks a copy of the draft into the folder he’s using for his letters to Spaulding, “I think you’d wanna see this! Love, Cheese”
  * It’s a long few months of sailing from outpost to outpost, filling the hold of the Harvest Moon with treasure that makes Jack and Marcid nod approvingly and Myrtle mix a martini to toast. Cheese keeps learning, keeps writing, never forgets that this is a mission for something more important than just treasure, never gives up on finding it.
  * The last entry he writes for Spaulding says, “I think this is the one, we’ve raided a lot of outposts but this feels like the one they sang songs about when they came back. We can see some warehouses and a couple of small boats and we’re gonna go in tomorrow night. See you soon!! Love you, Cheese.”




	9. Half-orc diaspora manifesto

> **a asian diaspora half-orc manifesto** including but not limited to
> 
>   * gorgug’s experience as a transracial adoptee goes beyond just “this kid is different from his parents” to one of navigating solace’s still canonically human-centric culture + gnomish culture that digby and wilma have their own estrangement from (see also: cutting ties with most of their family, having few friends outside each other) but that he engages with more by becoming an artificer like his parents + orcish and half-orcish culture which might exist in elmville and which being a barbarian connects him to a little bit but it’s not a hundred percent the same
>   * what becoming better friends with ragh might mean for gorgug, getting to know the barbarian’s barbarian with a half orc mom who still has his own complicated relationship to who he is and what he does. what dating zelda and becoming an honorary eighth maiden might mean for gorgug, getting to know katja cleaver the half-orc who’s _not_ a barbarian, who wields her greataxe with precision and calls herself a battlemaster thank you very much
>   * lydia barkrock commands mordred’s kitchen with one of those giant chinese cleavers (she used to use twin machetes back when she was a barbarian full-time. do not mess with this mom and her blades) that she uses for everything no matter how small + a massive wok. she’s got those asbestos hands and does not fear hot oil or flame or knives of any kind
>   * i just. food as love is such a profoundly asian/asian diaspora sentiment to me (food crosses the language barrier when you can’t say i love you in so many words) and lydia barkrock who enters mordred manor after her house got burned down in a shadowcat murder attempt and immediately starts offering to make dinner? that’s some asian auntie behavior!
>   * that famous chili? actually an absolutely amazing curry, spicy enough to make everyone except ragh and lydia cry. lydia takes one look at the number of kids in mordred manor and immediately undertakes a bunch of projects that require a ton of people like making lumpia or potstickers or stocking the freezer with pho broth in deli containers. (ragh folds dumplings with big gentle hands and years of practice. every other kid in mordred manor curses and makes lumpy ones. gorgug tries his best.)
>   * i say asian diaspora in general but personally i headcanon gorgug as specifically vietnamese (an experience with a complicated relationship to adoption and migration; my own personal experience of what happens when the community is alive and there but when you are a little distanced from your own diaspora; an experience that in my family is messy with regard to war and anger and grief). 
>   * the dnd language mechanics are a little weird to me and that’s changing with tasha’s but frankly there’s no way/reason for gorgug to know orcish even though that’s a half-orc language proficiency. but he speaks and reads gnomish, and the alphabet is the same but the pronounciation and the words don’t fit right in his head. gorgug looks at words he _should_ know but doesn’t and it makes him feel dumber than he has in a while and he wants to learn but he hates not knowing
>   * gorgug and his imposter syndrome and all the different things he does (sig figs. artificer. barbarian. bloodrush.) and it feels like trying to connect back with this is like being asked to pick again (to pick if he is a barbarian or an artificer; to pick if he is an orc or a thistlespring; to pick if he can be all these things or if he’s still the kid who catches backpacks) 
>   * the thistlesprings making more of an effort to go with gorgug and ragh and lydia to more of the orcish cultural events in elmville when they happen (orctoberfest, anyone?). they wave hi to the cleaver family  
> gorgug eating lydia’s food in mordred and thinking _this is like home_ and it’s not just because most of his party lives there and he’s over every day.
>   * lydia fills the freezer with pho broth; ragh’s shoulders push at the seams of ao gam at new year’s; gorgug takes zelda out for che now that basrar can make things that aren’t ice cream
>   * ragh’s glaive is a yem nguyệt đao, with a dragonflame blade which after fhfy is a reminder to him of how much his junior year changed him for the better. when gorgug gets his new gravity axe it’s one of those super heavy dong son pediform axes, heavy with history but also just with just bronze! 
> 


**Author's Note:**

> @mordredmanor on tumblr!


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